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Wednesday, 16 January 2013

In 1983, on the fiftieth anniversary of the
rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, Stern, a respected magazine in (what
at that time was) West Germany, made a sensational announcement. Stern
had discovered 27 volumes of the personal diaries of Adolf Hitler, the leader
of the Nazi party and Germany’s dictator from 1933 to 1945. Stern had sold the British
serialization rights to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the News Corporation, and the
story appeared simultaneously in the Sunday Times, in Britain.

In less than two weeks of the announcement,
the sensational diaries (which contained roughly 50,000 words), were proven
beyond doubt to be forgeries. The affair cost Stern several millions deutschmarks;
the reputations of a few suffered setbacks; and the careers of a few were
destroyed.

Novelist Robert Harris’s Selling
Hitler, first published in 1986 (Harris was a BBC journalist at the
time and a few years away from writing his blockbuster novels), is a riveting
account of how a small time crook—thanks to a combination of greed of few, incompetence
of some, and hubris of many (including renowned historians, hard-nosed managers
within Stern, and experienced journalists)—came to play a gigantic
hoax on the world and almost got away with it.

The person who faced the full wrath and
derision of the world when the diaries were proven to be fakes was the Stern
reporter Gerd Heidmann. Born in 1931, Heidmann was a member of ‘Hitler’s
Youth’. At the time of the publication of the diaries, Heidmann had worked for Stern
for more than 25 years. His reputation within Stern, until then, was not
exactly scintillating. He was regarded as someone who might have been able to
gather material for a story but not actually able to make a story out of it,
the job falling to the real journalists. Heidmann deeply resented this
insinuation, although he had, through the 1970s, accepted advanced payments
from his employers for writing books which he had failed to deliver. Heidmann
was also a man who, it would be fair to say, found it near impossible to put a
distance between him and the subject of his research (in a very loose sense of
the term). In the 1970s Heidmann began researching the memorabilia of the Third
Reich—for which there was apparently not inconsiderable demand, especially in
West Germany and America (according to Selling Hitler)—and found himself
getting increasingly immersed in the shadowy world of the German Nazis. The
Nazis Heidmann fraternised with included Hans Baur (Hitler’s personal pilot),
Otto Guensche (Hitler’s SS adjutant—the man who burned the corpses of Hitler
and Eva Braun after they committed suicide), as well as high profile Nazis who
had escaped the Nuremberg trials, such as Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke—the man
known as Hitler’s ‘last general’ following his spirited, if hopeless, fight
against the advancing Russians as Berlin fell and his master blew his brains out
with a pistol in his bunker. On an impulse Heidmann bought Carin II, the yacht that once belonged to Herman Goering himself. Around
that time he briefly had a relationship with Edda Goering, the only child of
Herman Goering. The yacht was in a state of great disrepair and Heidmann simply
did not have the means to maintain it. He tried to sell it, using a former Nazi
as a middle-man; however even after he brought down the price from over a
million deutschmarks to just under three quarters of a million, there was no
interest. As a result Heidmann was forced to take loans from Stern
and was heavily in debt by the time the 1980s arrived. It would appear that as
Heidmann ‘researched’ more and more into the dark depths of the Nazi rule of
Germany, his perspective towards the Third Reich began to change. He began
regularly wining and dining with the Nazis, and, when he married his third wife
(for the fourth time), Gina, a friend of Edda Goering, who shared Heidmann’s
interests in the Nazis, he requested Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke to be witnesses
(they obliged). For his honeymoon Heidmann—with Karl Wolff in tow—went sailing
in the South American sea where he spent the next nine weeks searching for
Joseph Mengele and Martin Bormann. Wolff introduced Heidmann to Klaus Barbie—the
‘Butcher of Lyons’ and a notorious war criminal. Heidmann would boast of his
friendship with Barbie in the years to come. Heidmann became increasingly obsessed with
collecting memorabilia of the Third Reich. In his quest to hoard as many things
as he could that might have had an outside chance of having been associated
with the Fuhrer, Heidmann came into contact with a wealthy South German, Fritz
Stiefel, who had a private collection of Hitler memorabilia. It was Stiefel who
showed Heidmann what he believed was a personal diary of Adolf Hitler.

At this stage enters the second protagonist
of the story—Konrad Kujau who had more aliases than you and I have had hot
meals. Originally from East Germany Kujau crossed the border and entered West
Germany a year before the wall went up. A compulsive liar, Kujau led a life of
petty larceny throughout the sixties, getting into trouble with the police on
innumerable occasions. Although he had not, at that time, embarked upon his
career in forgery, Kujau had shown awesome talent for weaving fantastic stories
explaining his past, education, and means of subsistence. Sometime in the 1970s
Kujau hit upon the idea of swindling gullible hunters of Nazi relics, and
started ‘creating’ fake originals. It started off as Kujau smuggling genuine
Nazi military memorabilia, via illegal trade, into West where (it would appear)
there was an unending demand for such bizarreries, from the Communist East
Germany where (it would seem) there was a ready supply. Sometime in the early
1970s Kujau ‘discovered’ the latent artist in him. He began introducing
forgeries into the genuine material. And when it came to Hitler Kujau had many
opportunities: not only could he copy Hitler’s handwriting, he could also forge
his paintings. Stiefel was one of Kujau’s customers.

When the Nazi obsessed Heidmann saw Stiefel’s
Hitler diary, he knew he was onto the
scoop of the decade. Soon he tracked down Kujau, except Kujau was calling himself
Fischer, in Stuttgart. Kujau, at this time, ran a cleaning business and a shop
of Third Reich memorabilia. Kujau weaved (yet another) fantastic story for Heidmann:
he had a brother in the East German army, who had managed to get his hands on
to the Nazi stash that included Hitler’s personal diaries. For a price Kujau
was willing to smuggle the diaries out of East Germany. Heidmann, without
running even a rudimentary search, swallowed Kujau’s story hook, line and
sinker. This may not be as surprising as it may seem at first: this was a man
who believed Martin Bormann was still alive and leading a secret life in Spain,
Switzerland and South America. What is surprising is Heidmann, who, until then,
had not produced any material of significance for Stern in his more than
twenty years of service, managed to bypass the editors and convince the
management that they could get their hands on to a scoop that would fetch the
magazine millions. The management, with utmost secrecy—the editors of the
magazine and Heidmann’s immediate managers (who did not think highly of the
reporter at all) were kept totally in the dark for a long time—colluded with
Heidmann’s plan. Heidmann became the contact person with Kujau (although until
the very end he kept the identity of the supplier secret from the management)
and was, in effect, provided with a carte
blanche to obtain Hitler’s diaries.

The reader reads with disbelief as tens of
thousands of deutschmarks were made available to Heidmann to buy each of the
diaries. It is estimated that Stern spent a total of 9 million
deutschmarks to obtain the diaries. It is also estimated that Heidmann siphoned
off roughly half of the amount to support a Sybaritic life-style as well as to
indulge fully in his all consuming passion of collecting Hitler memorabilia for
his personal collection. (And Kujau obliged. In Heidmann’s personal collection
was the pistol which, Heidmann believed, Hitler used to kill himself. Kujau,
very helpfully, had also supplied a note from Martin Bormann confirming that
the Fuhrer committed suicide with the pistol! Kujau also told Heidmann that he
could smuggle out of East Germany the original manuscript of Mein Kamfp!)

What is really breathtaking is the sheer
scale of the forgery and Kujau’s industriousness. All in all, sitting in his
attic in Stuttgart, Kujau produced 27 personal diaries of Adolf Hitler. All were
written in the old Germanic script, and each page of the diary was initialled
by Hitler! He also produced (for a hefty fee of course) Hitler’s ‘personal
notes’ on the Hess affair, which ‘showed’ that the Fuhrer was aware of Hess’s
flight because he (Hitler) wanted a peace treaty with Britain, and that he
declared Hess insane only because the mission failed.

Stern did seek
opinions from handwriting experts, all of whom opined that the handwriting was
probably Hitler’s; but, crucially, Stern did not subject the diaries to
forensic tests which would have proved, in a matter of days, that the diaries,
in fact, were crude forgeries: the paper used for the diaries as well as the
typewriter on which the diaries were typed were post-World War. When the
editors of the magazine were belatedly taken into confidence, their scepticism
of Heidmann’s discoveries was brushed aside, and they were ordered to tow the
‘party line’. (The editors, Peter Koch in particular, fought a heroic battle
when the scandal blew up in the magazine’s face. For all his efforts Koch was
made the scapegoat and made to step down when Stern was forced to
accept that the diaries were forgeries; which he did, but not before claiming
more than a million deutschmarks in severance fees.)

Two British historians played important, if
slightly peripheral, roles in the whole affair. One of them was the pompous Hugh
Trevor-Roper, who, at that time, was the master of Peterhouse, one of the
oldest and most conservative collages in Cambridge, UK. He had also managed to
become, through his connections, an Independent National Director of Times
Newspapers. Rupert Murdoch who had bought Times had no time for the
‘establishment waxworks’ such as Trevor-Roper (so the reader is informed in Selling
Hitler) but had allowed the historian—known for his sharp tongue,
intellectual arrogance and insistence on the kind of dinner table etiquettes
that would not have been out of place in Victorian Britain—to be one of the
independent directors because he was told that that would enhance his chances
of buying Times in class-ridden Britain.

Trevor-Roper (who had also managed to
become Lord Dacre of Glanton by this time) was considered in the UK as
something of an authority on Hitler. His reputation rested on two books, one
which he wrote and another which he edited.

In September 1945, Brigadier Dick White
(who later became the chief of both MI5 and MI6) was tasked with preparing a
report (in six weeks) on what had happened to Hitler. White delegated the
mission (codenamed Operation Nursery) to Trevor-Roper, who was, at that time,
his intelligence officer. With the zeal befitting an amateur detective
Trevor-Roper interviewed those who were close to Hitler in his last moments
(and were still alive). The fruition of the investigation was a book entitled The
Last Days of Hitler, which was regarded as a masterpiece in Britain
(and banned behind the Iron Curtain). The consensus on how Hitler ended his
life is derived from Trevor-Roper’s investigations. Trevor-Roper also edited,
introduced, and helped publish another book entitled Hitler’s Table Talk,
which was based on the extensive notes kept (on Martin Bormann’s orders) of
what passed for conversation when Hitler had his dinner, and during which the
Fuhrer expatiated on wide-ranging subjects. (It would seem that there wasn’t a
subject on which the Nazi dictator didn’t have an opinion: from the origins of
the planet to the superiority of air-cooled engines, the inability of the
English to perform Shakespeare and the legends of ancient Greece—the Fuhrer had
a view on everything; and these frenzied, semi-deranged soliloquies were recorded
verbatim by the slavish Martin Bormann.) When Rupert Murdoch became interested in
the Hitler diaries, Trevor-Roper was asked to fly to Switzerland (where, in the
vault of a bank, Stern, whose paranoia about the material leaking out had
reached unprecedented levels, had kept the diaries) and give his views on
whether the diaries were authentic. Trevor-Roper, who was not known for his
trusting nature, confirmed that the diaries were genuine. Trevor-Roper wrote in
the Times:

‘When
I entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those
volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied that the documents
are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and
that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality, and
even, perhaps, some public events may, in consequence, have to be revised.’

Trevor-Roper would begin to have doubts
about his own judgment fairly soon after this and he would partially recant his
opinion in the news-conference Stern arranged to convince the world
that the diaries were genuine, after allegations were levelledthat the diaries
were not genuine; however, it would be too little too late and Trevor-Roper’s
reputation would be severely damaged.

The other British historian, who (unlike
Trevor-Roper) did not have a reputation to lose, was the right wing David
Irving. In 2006 Irving went to prison because of his views on the Holocaust; in
the 1980s he was regarded in Britain—in a kind of grotesque euphemism that only
the British seem capable of—as a ‘maverick’ because of the very same views.
Irving had published a book entitled Hitler’s War which was widely criticised
(and consequently sold well) because of his portrayal of Hitler. (Irving’s stated
purpose was to portray Hitler as an ordinary man and not as a diabolical
figure.) Needless to say the book and its author were very popular amongst the
neo-Nazis and the Holocaust-deniers. Irving, who routinely met with right-wing,
neo-Nazi groups, was approached in the 1980s by a German man called August
Priesack. Priesack—‘Professor’ Priesack as he called himself—had reached the
pinnacle of his career in the 1930s when he was employed by the Nazi party to
track down Hitler’s paintings. (His task was to buy up as many paintings as he
could and then sort out the genuine from the fake; it would appear that fake
Hitler paintings were flooding the markets even then.) After the Second World
War Priesack’s fortunes had predictably nosedived. And now he wanted Irving’s
help because he was in trouble. The previous year Priesack had brought out a
book containing hitherto unpublished photographs of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.
The Bavarian authorities had charged Priesack with contravening anti-Nazi
legislation. Priesack, who had greatly admired Hitler’s War, was hoping
that Irving would provide him with a character reference! It was in his meeting
with Priesack that Irving first became aware of the story of Hitler’s diaries.
How did Priesack know about their existence? Because Fritz Stiefel had earlier
approached the ‘professor’ to seek his views on the authenticity of the
Hitler’s diary Kujau had sold him. Priesack had seen the Hitler’s diary at
Stiefel’s residence where he had also met Konrad Kujau. The content of the
diary in Stiefel’s possession was (like the diaries Kujau would later sell to
Heidmann) utterly trivial and banal. Despite this the ‘professor’ had no doubt
that the diary was genuine. He had even paid an emotional tribute to Kujau.
‘You,’ Priesack told Kujau, ‘are our salvation. You must find more documents.
History will thank you.’ (Kujau did ‘find’ several more documents—27 more
volumes of Hitler’s diary to be exact—and went to prison for his efforts.
History did not thank him.) It was this story that Priesack passed on to Irving
during their meeting. (By this time Kujau was passing himself as a middleman,
and had invented a brother in the East German army who, ‘at great personal
risk’ and ‘bribing several Communist officials’, was helping to smuggle the
diaries out of East Germany). Priesack had made photocopies of a few pages of
the Hitler diary he had seen at Stiefel’s residence. He passed them on to
Irving. The day after his meeting with Priesack, Irving sat down to examine the
photocopies. Although he was no hand-writing expert or a Forensic analyst,
Irving reached the inescapable conclusion in less than 3 hours: the diary was a
forgery. Irving came to this conclusion simply by reading the diary carefully
and discovering that several words were written differently in different
documents (which suggests that Kujau was not a particularly accomplished forger,
after all) and a number of words were misspelt. Irving noted in his personal
diary:

‘By
lunch-time I was unfortunately satisfied that the Priesack collection was
stuffed with fake documents.’

At this time Irving (according to Selling
Hitler) was in deep financial trouble, following a rancorous and costly
divorce. When he got wind of the news that Stern was on the verge of announcing
their sensational discovery of Hitler’s diaries, Irving swung into action. He
went to rival newspapers as well as television channels (in West Germany), and
gave a spree of interviews (at very handsome fees) in which he denounced the
documents as fakes. (Selling Hitler informs that Irving
earned £15,000 in less than a month.) He even turned up at the conference Stern
organized (which Hugh Trevor-Roper also attended) when the scandal
began snowballing, and disrupted the conference by waving the photocopies of
the fake documents he had in his possession. Irving was however a man of
altogether lesser moral fibre. His involvement in this affair was entirely
dictated by self-interest. He wanted to string along the controversy for as
long as he could (more television interviews and newspaper articles). When he
realised, upon his return to England from West Germany, that the brouhaha was
settling down (because most now believed that the documents were forgeries),
Irving gave an interview to the BBC saying that he had changed his mind and now
thought the diaries were genuine. It did not work, as the forensic tests (which
Stern
should have carried out at the beginning) proved beyond doubt that the diaries
were fakes. However, as mentioned earlier, it wasn’t as if Irving (as observed
bitterly by Peter Koch, the editor of Stern) had a reputation to lose.

Why would anyone give serious consideration
to the notion that Adolf Hitler, during his years in power—his schedule crammed
with murdering millions of Jews and invading countries and ushering Europe into
a disastrous war—had the time to write diaries, especially when he was supposed
to have remarked in the 1940s that he hated writing?

Selling Hitler
provides two possible explanations. The first one is rooted in an anecdote
recounted by Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, in his memoir, entitled Hitler’s
Pilot, which was published in the 1950s. The anecdote in turn relates
to a true historical event. On 20 April 1945, as Hitler ‘celebrated’ his 56th
and final birthday, a mission codenamed ‘Operation Seraglio’ began. This involved
evacuating about 80 members of Hitler’s entourage from his Berlin bunker to a
destination in South Germany, where the Nazis had half-formulated a plan to
form a new centre of command in the event of Berlin’s fall to the allied forces
which, at this stage, was imminent. (Hitler himself had refused to leave, as
had Eva Braun, his companion of several years. Braun would achieve her
life-long ambition of becoming Mrs Hitler within the next 9 days, and would
kill herself, along with Hitler, the day after the marriage.) Hans Baur had
managed to make two planes available for the mission. In addition to people, a
mass of official government documents, personal papers, personal properties and
valuables—filling ten trunks—were loaded onto the two planes. One of the planes
was to be flown by Major Friedrich Gundlfinger, a veteran of the Russian front.
It was the plane Gudlfinger was flying that did not complete the journey.
Gudlfinger’s plane crashed into the Heidenholz forest close to the Czech
border, very near to a small German village of Boernersdorf. All the trunks,
carrying documents, on the plane went missing—possibly destroyed, possibly
stolen by the villagers who rushed to the spot after the plane crashed. The
information that Gudlfinger’s plane had gone missing was relayed to General
Baur in Berlin; and it fell to Baur to inform the Fuhrer that one of the planes
in ‘operation Seraglio’ had gone missing. Ten years later, in his memoir (Hitler’s
Pilot) Baur recorded Hitler’s reaction when he heard the news. Hitler,
Baur recalled, ‘became very pale’, and asked which plane had gone missing. When
informed that it was the plane Gudlfinger was flying, Hitler (according to
Baur’s memoir) appeared ‘very upset’. He then uttered words (recorded in the
memoir) that would cause much mischief forty years later. ‘In that plane,’
Hitler exclaimed, ‘were all my private archives that I had intended as a
testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!’ When Konrad Kujau invented a
brother in the East German army who, he (Kujau) claimed had got his hands on
the stash from this plane, the Nazi-obsessed Heidmann had no trouble in
accepting the hypothesis that the trunks on Gundlfinger’s plane contained
Hitler’s personal diaries, which had somehow survived the crash. Heidmann, with
a colleague from Stern, even made a trip to the sleepy hamlet of Boernersdorf
(at that time in East Germany) and confirmed from the older villagers that
there indeed had been a plane crash in the dying days of the Third Reich. From
this information Heidmann made the leap of faith that the diaries Kujau was
passing on to him were genuine Hitler diaries that were on this plane. This is
the second explanation Selling Hitler provides as to why
Kujau’s improbable story was believed. Kujau was believed because people wanted
to believe him; either because they had lost their perspective (Heidmann) in
their mania for the Third Reich memorabilia, or because they were desperate for
a sensational story (management of Stern)—which they thought would
bring them fame and money—and had taken leave of their common sense.

Heidmann and Kujau’s worlds came crashing
when the diaries were shown, beyond doubt, to be false, and Stern
was forced to accept that they had made a monumental error of judgement. The Stern
management forced Heidmann to finally reveal who his contact was. After that he
was summarily fired and Stern announced that they would be
pressing charges against him for fraud. Stern accepted that Heidmann
genuinely believed that the forged diaries were genuine; the fraud charges
related to the money (meant for the diaries) he had siphoned off. As the
spokesperson for Stern said, ‘Heidmann has not just been deceived, he too is a
deceiver.’ The name Heidmann supplied to Stern was Konrad Fischer (which was
what Kujau had told his name was to Heidmann). Kujau realised the balloon was
going up when he read in the newspapers (in Stuttgart) about the controversy.
He phoned Heidmann, telling him that he was phoning from Czechoslovakia. A
distraught Heidmann told him that the diaries were fakes. ‘Who could have
forged so much?’ Heidmann demanded to know. ‘Oh my God,’ wailed Kujau, ‘oh my
God!’ Heidmann told him that both of them were going to end up in prison. ‘Come
on,’ pleaded Heidmann, ‘where did you get the books from?’ ‘They are from East
Germany, man.’ Kujau replied.

Kujau was of course not in Czechoslovakia;
but neither was he in Stuttgart. He was in the Austrian industrial town of
Dornbirn, near the Bavarian border, holed up in the house of the parents of his
mistress. His plan was to sit it out in Austria till things cooled off. That
was not going to happen. Every day on the Austrian television was news about
the fake diaries. It was Kujau’s turn to feel shocked and betrayed when he
learned that Stern had given Heidmann a total of 9 million deutschmarks to
buy the diaries. Kujau had received at most a quarter of the sum. The deceiver
had been deceived. Kujau, bitterly upset, phoned his lawyer in Stuttgart and
learned that the Hamburg State Prosecutors were looking for him. The police had
broken into Kujau’s premises and, watched by a gaggle of reporters, had removed
evidence: ten cartons and two sacks full of books about Hitler, correspondence,
newspaper cuttings, a copy of Mein Kamfp and
artists’ material. Kujau contacted the Hamburg prosecutor and told him that he
was willing to surrender voluntarily. Kujau returned to Germany and, over the
next ten days, stuck to his original story—that he was only a middleman and the
diaries had indeed come from East Germany. But, true to form, he weaved another
story. It was not his brother but another man, called ‘Mirdorf’, whom Kujau had
known when he was living in East Germany, who had supplied Kujau with the
diary, which Kujau had sold to Fritz Stiefel. Later, after Heidmann became
aware of the diary and pressed Kujau to provide more diaries, Kujau contacted
‘Mirdorf’ and obtained more diaries. This was a wildly improbable story and the
Hamburg prosecutors had no trouble demolishing it. The only part of Kujau’s
story that was true was that he had not received 9 million deutschmarks from
Heidmann.

As Heidmann had predicted both he and Kujau
were charged with fraud; both were found guilty and were sent to prison for 4
and 3 years respectively. During the trial Heidmann went completely to pieces,
while Kujau revelled in the notoriety and gave interviews to magazines from his
cell.

At the time several theories floated about
the origins of the diaries and possible conspiracy behind them. Communists saw
a Capitalist plot to denigrate them; Capitalists saw a Communist plot to spread
disinformation and destabilise the Federal Republic of Germany. To some
historians it was fresh evidence of the continued hold of Hitler over the West
German society. The truth, in all probability, was more prosaic. As mentioned
at the beginning, a small time crook and a forger managed to hoodwink people because
of the naivety, incompetence and greed of those whom he hoodwinked. That said,
as Selling
Hitler postulates, there are a few unanswered questions about Konrad
Kujau. The foremost is when, how and why did he learn to forge Nazi documents
which fooled a number of handwriting experts and ‘Hitler specialists’. Did he
learn his craftsmanship by working for someone else? Although it is possible
that Kujau might have had an accomplice to help him forge the diaries (although
he denied it), the reason the fraud swelled to the level it did was the utter
incompetence of Stern. Kujau probably did not guess (who could?) that the
magazine would behave so foolishly.

Selling Hitler, first
published in 1986, does not say what happened to the two protagonists of the
story. WikiPedia informs that both Heidmann and Kujau served their sentences
and were released after a few years. Heidmann’s career was destroyed and he
never recovered from the debacle. Kujau, on the other hand, thrived. For a few
years after his prison release Kujau became something of a minor celebrity and
appeared on television show as a ‘forgery expert’. Soon he set up a business selling ‘genuine
Kujau fakes’. He even stood for the election of the Mayer of Stuttgart (he lost;
you’d be relieved to know). He died in 2000 of cancer when he was 62. In 2006
his grand-niece was charged with selling ‘fake forgeries’, cheap Asian made
copies of famous paintings, with forged signatures of Konrad Kujau. Heidmann is
alive and apparently leads an impoverished existence. In 2002 it was alleged
that Heidmann had worked for the dreaded East German secret service, Stasi, although he portrayed himself as
a double agent. Heidmann vehemently denied that he had ever worked for Stasi.

When last interviewed a few years ago, Heidmann
still believed that the diaries were original.

Until this
year I had not read anything written by Gertrude Stein, and my knowledge of her
was very limited: an obscure, modernist American writer, who lived most of her
life in Paris.

I picked up
The
Autobiography of Alice B Toklas from the local library out of
curiosity. The blurb said that although the book was entitled as an
autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein’s life-long ‘companion’ (an early
twentieth century euphemism for a lesbian partner), it was actually Stein’s
autobiography. The ‘autobiography’ is a pleasure to read. It has a wonderfully
gossipy feel to it. Gertrude Stein is a great raconteur and the book is full of
anecdotes about various artists with whom Stein mingled in the first thirty
years of twentieth century. The cavalcade of artists is unending. Picasso and
Matisse are but two of the artists who appear in this very engaging memoir.
Stein doesn’t much care about chronology of events when she tells her story,
and neither should you: just immerse yourself in the artistic world in Paris at
the turn of the last century. (Also ignore Stein’s penchant for peculiar
punctuation.) If you have a Kindle or
any other e-reader, this book is free to download on Project Guttenberg.

After
reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, I wanted to find out
whether Alice B Toklas had herself written anything. It turned out that she
had. Thirty years after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas,
and seventeen years after Stein’s death, Toklas, nearing the sad end of her
long life, published her own memoir, entitled What is Remembered. The
memoir ends with Stein’s death. Tokals’s style is much more sedate than Stein’s
and she essentially covers the same ground as in Stein’s book. What comes
across very poignantly is the close bond the two women shared and how Stein was
the centre of Toklas’s life. I found the simplicity of Toklas’s narration
touching.

Michael
Frayn’s memoir, My Father’s Fortune, was moving in parts. In fact I had heard
Frayn in a literary programme where he read extracts from his memoir and spoke
at some length about his family and his father’s life. Frayn’s mother died when
he was relatively young, and it was his father who raised him and his younger
sister. The memoir is at times self-consciously twee, but on the whole
enjoyable.

May Day was in June is the third volume of Clive
James’s memoir. It has everything I have come to expect from a Clive James
memoir. Like the previous volumes of the memoir, May Day was in June
pullulates with off-the-wall, larger than life characters. James has almost
eidetic memory for events and describes at great length and in great detail
(and very wittily) incidents that happened decades ago. At times, though, the
tone becomes too flippant; also James does not give much by the way of
information about his inner life; the narrative moves along in a series of
incidents where James passes side-splittingly funny observations about people
and events. What the memoir also does,
very expertly, is, to create for the reader, the atmosphere among the academics
in Cambridge in the 1960s.

Cooking for Claudine is a quirky book by John Baxter
(another book I picked up out of idle curiosity from the local library; I had
never heard of Baxter before). The book is about a Christmas meal Baxter
prepared for the French family of his French wife (Claudine is his ‘formidable’
mother-in-law). The title is a bit of a misnomer: Baxter cooks the Christmas
meal not just for Claudine but for the entire French clan of his wife. After
reading this immensely enjoyable book, I wasn’t clear why Claudine was
described as ‘formidable’; if anything, she comes across as a sweet old dear. Cooking
for Claudine abounds with good humour. The book is part memoir, and
Baxter regales the reader with anecdotes collected from his peripatetic life
across several continents (before he settled down with Claudine’s daughter, in
Paris, at the age of fifty). I enjoyed Cooking for Claudine so much that I
have ordered another book by Baxter, A Pound of Paper, which allegedly is
about Baxter’s life-long love affair with books.

Selling Hitler is an early non-fiction book by the
best-selling novelist Robert Harris. It is a thrilling account of how a
small-time crook from West Germany came to hoodwink the publishing world by
selling them fake diaries of Adolf Hitler for multi-million deutschmarks in the
1980s. Harris’s droll, sardonic style of narration adds to the enjoyment.

I read
Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman because it was chosen by the book-group of
which I am a member. Most in the book-group (consisting in its entirety of men)
were scathing of this book, with one claiming that he found it impossible to go
beyond the first few pages. I found it easily possible to complete the book.
Driven by the curiosity to find out how Moran coped with life-changing events
such as developing tits and growing pubes (the chapters have titles such as ‘I
Need a Bra’ and ‘I Grow Furry’) I finished the book, which is part memoir part
collection of essays, in two sittings. Moran, who is apparently a popular
columnist in the Times, keeps a steady supply of humorous observations which
makes it an easy and entertaining read. If she had a serious point, I missed
it.

I had read
Alexander Master’s Stuart: a Life Backwards a few years ago and I had enjoyed it.
The book told the true story of a drug addict or an alcoholic (most probably
both), who was in the habit of assaulting others, taking overdoses etcetera, to
bring some fun to his otherwise bleak life, and who eventually killed himself
by jumping in front of a train. What I remember liking about Stuart:
a life Backwards, was Master’s style of narration, which avoided
falling into the trap of maudlin sentimentality. The book, in spite of the grim
subject matter, managed to be hilarious without being insulting to or
condescending towards Stuart, its ‘hero’, who—sorry as you felt about his sorry
life and sad, though not entirely unexpected, demise—you were glad was not your
next door neighbour. In The Genius in My Basement, a
peripheral (real life) character in Stuart: a Life Backwards takes the
centre-stage, viz., Master’s landlord, who is described as ‘eccentric’ in the
earlier book. In The Genius in My Basement you learn a bit more about this
‘eccentric’ landlord, Simon Norton. When you finish reading the book you reach
the inescapable conclusion that the term ‘barking’ would be more apposite. The
main point of Master’s new book (as I understood it) is that here was a man who
probably was a genius—at least that’s what everyone who knew him in school
thought—a prodigy in the making, in mathematics (isn’t it curious that you can
be a prodigy only in certain fields—mathematics, chess, music; have you heard
of a prodigy brick-layer?), who lost the gift somewhere along the way, which is
very sad. On the positive side, Simon himself doesn’t give a sh*t; he never
considered himself to be a genius, anyway; and is happy as a Larry.

I am not a
fan of Stephen Fry, who has, in the UK, a reputation for being a versatile actor,
witty host of television shows, and in general talented. I think he is only
some of these things: he is an actor, though not particularly versatile; he
hosts a few shows on the terrestrial channels (in particular the incredibly
boring QI) but I don’t think reading out semi-witty comments written
by television hacks makes you witty; and as for being gifted, it is, well, a
matter of opinion. The Fry Chronicles is the most recent instalment of Fry’s
memoirs. What I remember of this memoir, which I read at the beginning of 2012,
is Fry’s (not very convincing) attempts to appear very modest about his
success, and his repeated exhortations to the readers to consider him very
lucky to have achieved ‘what little success’ he has enjoyed despite his meagre
talent. I had little trouble believing him. Does Fry believe it himself? Would
you believe a fat man who says he is into minimalism?

On to
fiction.

The best
fiction I read In 2012 was towards the end of the year: Robertson Davies’s
superlative The Deptford Trilogy, comprising three novels (Fifth
Business, The Manticore, and The World of Wonders) originally
published in the 1970s. Superbly plotted and exquisitely written, the novel
sequence is one of those books which have riveting plots and burst with ideas. This is the birth centenary year of Davies and one hopes there will be a revival of his novels.

Manohar Malgaonkar was an earlier generation of Indian writers who (I suspect) is a
forgotten name even in his own country (which, these days, seems to be
producing high numbers of writers writing in original English, for a country
where English is not a ‘native’ language). Manohar Malgaonkar’s name was
suggested by an Indian friend, who also presented me with a copy of his 1970s
non-fiction book, The Men Who Killed Gandhi, Malgaonkar’s investigative account
of the conspiracy to assassinate Mahtama
Gandhi, considered to be the father of the modern Indian nation. I found the
book unputdownable, one of the most thrilling books I have read in recent
years. A modicum of Internet search revealed that Malganokar (who died in 2010
at the age of 97) had written a number of novels, all of which out of print at
present. I read two of the novels (ordered from second-hand book-shops) in
2012. A Bend in the Ganges has India’s bloody partition as its
background, while The Cactus Country is based on the 1971 India-Pakistan war
which resulted in the creation of a new country, Bangla Desh. Both the novels
are extremely well-written, very atmospheric, and ring with authenticity. A
Bend in the Ganges, in particular, is very harrowing in parts. I asked
my friend whether there were any other novels written by Indian writers on
India’s partition (which has the dubious distinction of being the event
responsible for the forced migration of highest number of people in the twentieth
century), and he suggested two: A Train to Pakistan, written in original
English by the celebrated Indian novelist, Khushwant Singh, and Tamas
(a Sanskrit word, apparently, for Darkness), an original Indian language novel
(translated into English under the same title) by Bhisham Sahani. I read Tamas,
which tells the story, in a series of extraordinary incidents, of Sikh and
Hindu families caught in the madness of India’s partition as the communal
violence engulfed what would become Pakistan. Tamas leaves you with
terrible sadness for the human condition.

Emperor of Lies, a huge success in Sweden upon its
publication, has, at its centre, one of the most controversial characters in
the Holocaust history: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the eponymous hero of Steve
Sem-Sandberg’s novel. Rumkowski ran for the Nazis the Lodz ghetto in Poland before it
was liquidated (and Rumkowski, the ‘eldest of the Jews’, met his own end in
Auschwitz). Sem-Sandberg’s portrait of Rumkowski is relentlessly unsympathetic
(despite his assertion in the ‘afterword’ that he has not taken any ideological
position towards Rumkowski). The novel is also a painstakingly researched
chronicle of the daily life of the largest ghetto in Europe. While it means
that the novel has a vast number of characters, very heavily based on real-life
denizens of the ghetto, each with a heart-breaking story, which robs the novel
somewhat of narrative coherence, it also makes it a very fascinating read. A
remarkable novel on a tragic period in twentieth century Europe (translated in
faultless English by Sarah Death).

King of Badgers is a ‘state of the nation’ novel
Philip Hensher seems to be focusing on writing these days. I like Philip
Hensher, who is difficult to pigeonhole as a novelist because he has published
novels in different genres and on different subjects (though not with equal
success). My most favourite Hensher novels are his earlier ones (e.g. Kitchen
Venom) full of mordant wit. King of Badgers is Hensher’s seventh
novel, the starting point of which (very dramatic) is based on the true story of
a mother in the UK who faked her daughter's kidnapping in order to get
money. Hensher excels at looking under the veneer of the respectable lives we
lead and into the motives that drive us, throwing into sharp relief the defects
and foibles of our existence. Weariness, exhaustion and sexual predatoriness
seem to blight the lives of most of the characters in King of Badgers. The plot
of the novel also becomes amorphous as the novel progresses, but on the whole,
the novel succeeds in holding a mirror to the modern British society.

Anna funder
achieved worldwide fame a few years ago with her superlative Stasiland,
a fascinating account of the lives of ordinary people in the former German
Democratic Republic. She has followed it up with All that I Am. It is a
historical novel, which has long forgotten real-life characters that, in the
1930s, exiled to England from Germany for their anti-Hitler views, tried to
form an anti-Nazi resistance movement. At the centre of this utterly absorbing
story are the tragic figures of Ernest Toller, a left-wing playwright who rose
to prominence in the Weimar Republic, and Dora Fabian, an intrepid young Jewish
woman who might have been Toller’s muse, and whose mysterious death set Toller’s life on a trajectory that ended, five years after Fabian’s
death, in a hotel in New York. All that I am ticked all the boxes
for me. It is simply yet elegantly written, does not lack drama, and is,
ultimately, incredibly moving. I couldn’t recommend it enough.

The Indian
writer Arvind Adiga was virtually unknown until he won the Booker Prize for The
White Tiger in 2008 (not altogether surprising, seeing as it was
Adiga’s debut novel). The White Tiger was a savage
indictment of the inequalities in the Indian society and its less than perfect
political system. In Last Man in Tower Adiga turns the
searchlight on to Mumbai’s (India’s commercial capital) middle classes. With
great skill Adiga tells the story of middle-class greed and betrayal in a
manner that is humane and understanding. Last Man in Tower is, in some ways,
a morality tale: how in the face of a promise of a better life, life-long
friendships, allegiance and values crumble. It is a brilliantly executed subtle
tragic-comedy, which confirms that Adiga is a formidable talent.

Talking of
Booker-winners, Julian Barnes, one of my favourite novelists, won the award
(finally) for The Sense of an Ending, in 2011. The Sense of an Ending
can be seen as a thematic continuation of Barnes’s memoir, Nothing to be Frightenedof (reviewed on this blog some years ago),
published a few years before The Sense of an Ending: namely the
tricks memory plays when we recall past events which have shaped our lives. The
Sense of an Ending reads like a thriller. The narrative—laced with
Barnes’s trademark asides and musings on life—builds up a momentum that propels
the eager reader towards the denouement, which doesn't disappoint.

I read
Bouhmil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England because it had an endorsement on
the front page by Julian Barnes who had described Hrabal as a ‘superb writer’.
(As per the WikiPedia entry, Hrabal, a Czech writer who fell to his death from
a hospital building in 1997, at the age of 83, is considered one of the best
writers of the twentieth century. It just shows my ignorance of non-English writers
that I needed Julian Barnes’s endorsement to become aware of Hrabal. How well
known Barnes might be in Czech Republic? Would he need endorsement from
well-known Czech writers when his translated novels are promoted there?) I
Served the King of England (the title is a bit of a misnomer, as the
protagonist never actually serves the King of England, although he serves the
exiled monarch of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie) is a picaresque novel that has a
fantastical feel to it. The novel is funny in a macabre way—its protagonist
refuses to take anything or anybody—least of all himself—seriously—because what
Hrabal is doing here (I think) is commentating on the bleakness of human lives.

Jennifer
Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad became hugely popular upon its publication
and also won for its author the 2011 Pulitzer Award for fiction. It is a novel
of thirteen chapters. Egan described it as a book of loosely connected stories,
which is what it is, although in the UK it was marketed as a novel.
Unsurprisingly there is no settled tone to the narrative; it is a polyphonic
‘novel’ of shifting narrative voices. Egan also boldly experiments with the
form in the novel (not always with success). The interlocking stories, very
readable and entertaining in themselves, depict, thematically (like the as in I
Served the King of England ), fractured and frequently unsatisfying
lives in twenty-first century America.

The
Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues was shortlisted in
the UK for several awards but didn’t win any, as far as I am aware. Which is a
shame. Half Blood Blues is an absorbing tale of friendship, betrayal
and, ultimately, redemption. It is also an oblique commentary on the status of
blacks in Nazi Germany. A great pleasure
of reading this novel is its lyrical language, pithy metaphors and easy-on-the
ear slang. There are a few false notes, especially towards the end, but on the
whole it is a first-rate novel.

James
Hilton was a Twentieth century British novelist who wrote very popular novels
in his time, some of which were also made into successful Hollywood films in
the 1930s and 1940s. I read Lost Horizon, Hilton’s novel which
donated the English language the term Shangri La, out of a sense of nostalgia.
It used to be a very favourite novel of my father. In it Hilton creates a world
which, while it requires suspension of credulity on reader’s part, gives him a
glimpse of what might be described as higher order of existence.

Steve
Martin is a seriously good comic actor and has been described as ‘indecently
multitalented’ by The Sunday times. In the past few years Martin has diverted
some of his energies into writing fiction. In 2012 I read An Object of Beauty,
Martin’s third novel, in which he turns his attention to the world of painting.
In it Martin creates for the reader the world of New York art scene where talent
and creativity collide with cold commercial calculations. It is a well-plotted
novel but the tone of the narrative is not even and, despite the witty
one-liners which come thick and fast, is curiously flat at times. Well worth a
read, though.

Lucky Break is British novelist Esther Freud’s
seventh novel. In it Freud, the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud (and
great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud), who was herself an aspiring actress many
years ago, portrays, gently and tender-heartedly, the world of
aspiring actors struggling to establish themselves. The novel progresses at a
sedate pace and, despite its subject matter, eschews drama and grand gestures;
however Freud more than makes up for it with her astute observations and gentle
humour.

The
American novelist Jessica Frances Kane’s debut novel, The Report, fictionalizes
a little known tragedy that took place in London, in the 1940s, in the middle
of the Second World War. The novel—written in a devastatingly
effective understated tone—is a humane and astute examination of human emotions
and the human need to make sense of what has befallen us even though the
understanding—as in the case of some of the characters in the novel—will bring
nothing but heartache. I loved this novel.

With A Man
of Parts, David Lodge returns to the realm of biographical novel. In it
we learn more about the remarkable life (or part of it) of one of the most
remarkable figures in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century British
literature: H.G. Wells. Lodge focuses on what is generally regarded as the
period when Wells was at the peak of his powers. Like Author Author (Lodge’s
2005 biographical novel based on the period in the life of the American
novelist Henry James) A Man of Parts is a mixed bag. At
times the novel, which extensively quotes from Wells’s published writings,
reads more like a chronicle of Wells’s life and less like a novel. Lodge
probably covers no new grounds, and, seeing as there are excellent and
thoroughly researched biographies of Wells available (including one written by
his son Anthony West) one wonders what the purpose was behind A Man
of Parts other than give an opportunity to readers like me, who have
neither the patience nor intellectual wherewithal to plough through the weighty
biographies, to learn more about H.G. wells.

I read H.G.
Wells’s History of Mr Polly after I read in the A Man of Parts that it
was a hugely successful novel in its time. The novel was first published over a
hundred years ago and it shows, especially in the prose and narrative style;
but its theme transcends time. There are also a couple of bravura set-pieces,
described by Wells with great gusto.

I re-read
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita after several years for the book-group of which I am a
member, and once again marvelled at the erudition, cleverness, language and
humour of the novel.

Another
novel I re-read for the book-group was William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach. It is
one of Boyd’s early novels and cemented his reputation in the UK as a novelist.
It is a well-written novel (you expect nothing less from Boyd) which has two
stories, neither of which resolves satisfactorily.

Michael
Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is one of the most
side-splittingly funny novel I have read in recent times. The novel is written
in the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and has, at its core, a mystery.
The novel, which is set in a hypothetical Jewish colony in Alaska, is also a ‘what
if’ novel. Apparently there was a suggestion, as the Second World War loomed,
that the European Jewry be resettled in Alaska (as per the afterword of the
novel), which for a number of reasons did not come to fruition. A very
satisfying read.

A few years
ago I had read the improbably named T. Coraghessen Boyle’s The Road to Wellville and
had enjoyed it tremendously. I then went on a buying spree and bought 8-9 more
novels and short-stories of the supremely prolific Boyle, but did not read any
until this year. I read The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle’s 1995
novel in 2012. It is a heavy satire on a subject that is still very topical
and triggers strong emotions on both sides of the Atlantic: illegal immigrants.
Boyle’s novel deals with the immigrants from Mexico into California. The
Tortilla Curtain crackles with Boyle’s scintillating prose; there are
also several vividly imagined set-pieces that take your breath away. The novel
is not without its flaws but is a very compelling read.

Jeffrey
Euginide’s The Marriage Plot, like his two earlier novels, is gracefully written and oozes erudition; unlike the two previous novels, there is no subterranean disturbing element in The Marriage Plot, which is essentially a 21st century middle-class romance (nothing wrong with that); a witty, literary romance, but lacking perhaps in the complexities of human desire. The novel is remarkable for
its striking description of Manic Depressive Psychosis from which one of the main characters suffers.

I read a
number of novels of Nobel Prize winners this year, which left me feeling underwhelmed. I have reviewed Herta
Muller’s The Passport, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, and Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, and Gunter Grass's The Box (released in the UK as fiction and elsewhere as non-fiction) on this
blog.

William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, full of Southern misery, brought me as
near to death as was possible without actually dying. It is the kind of novel
you’d probably not enjoy when you read it but would be very glad to have finished.

Finally, Jean
Christophe. I had planned to read all the volumes of Romain Rolland’s
three-volume novel sequence (consisting of ten novels), which were singled out
for special praise when Rolaand was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature
(1915) in 2012, but managed to finish only the first volume. I shall read the
remaining two volumes in 2013.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.